Fancy seeing a Spike Lee movie (or – better – a Spike Lee
joint) in which the hero is a cop! Lee, has raised a few hackles in the
African-American community by focusing not on police brutality against unarmed
black men but on the heroics of some Colorado Springs cops (both black and
white) who joined forces in the Seventies to strike a blow against white
supremacists. Which is not to say that Lee’s new film, BlacKkKlansman, has no contemporary resonance. Lee never lets us
forget that the racist right-wingers he portrays in the film are still very
much with us. (The specter of Charlottesville dramatically hangs over the
movie, as doe rhetoric coming out of today’s White House.)
How to reconcile Lee’s personal politics with the demands of
this story, based as it is on the real-life experiences of Colorado police detective
Ron Stallworth? The key is to see Lee’s film, like the behavior of his
real-life characters, as an exercise in role-playing. It’s hardly that Lee is
insincere. It’s just that he’s many things: a political provocateur, a highly
gifted filmmaker, an intellect who can see multiple sides of an issue, someone
who values the opportunity to entertain as well as to enlighten. I’ve loved the
early Spike Lee movies, like the
powerful Do the Right Thing, but over
the years I’ve tended to lose interest. In this new film, which was acclaimed at the
2018 Cannes Film Festival, Lee successfully combines fun with moral
indignation, puckish comedy with high drama. It’s a brilliant performance.
The spectacle of Lee
juggling many masks with this film fits right in with the behavior of his
characters. Stallworth (John David Washington) sometimes chafes at the distance
between himself as an undercover police officer and the earnest young
black-is-beautiful types with whom he associates when off duty. But he can gleefully
pass himself off as a Ku Klux Klan aspirant because his telephone voice doesn’t
betray his color. (As he confidently explains to his chief, he’s fluent in both
the Queen’s English and jive.) Meanwhile Flip, the fellow officer chosen to
represent Ron for in-person hang-outs with the Klan, turns out to be Jewish. In
one of the film’s many striking moments, Flip (Adam Driver) ponders the fact
that consorting with racists -- and being required to voice ugly racist
sentiments himself -- has reminded him for the first time in his life of the
ethnic background he’s always largely ignored. Suddenly, he muses, he can
understand the need for heritage, for ritual. The word “ritual” stood out for
me in this context, because the behavior of the white supremacists shows that
they too need it, as a way to shore up their misgivings about their own
failings. They’re a pretty sorry lot: a drunk, a restless soldier, an angry
little man. That explains the appeal of donning a pointy hood and robe, and joining
forces with like-minded others for a cross-burning. It’s essentially putting on
a mask and playing a role, in order to convince the world that you’re more than
you might seem.
Lee, as a filmmaker, fully knows the power of cinema to
shape our conscious (and unconscious) minds. That’s why he brilliantly makes
use of film clips from Gone With the Wind
and (especially) Birth of a Nation,
to explain the romanticism embedded in the white supremacist‘s all too
black-and-white view of the world. He also has fun with the image of the
African-American gangsta type, as embedded in blaxploitation films like Shaft and Superfly. How lucky we are to have someone of his caliber exploring
our complicated interracial world.
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